Earlier this month Jesse Ramazami was out for a midnight walk near his home in Manor when he noticed something strange moving across the sky.
It appeared to be on fire, leaving a trail of smoke in its wake.
“I've seen a really big meteor before, but definitely nothing like this” he said. “It was definitely shocking.”
Ramazami did what most of us would do. He pulled out his phone and started recording.
The video he took and later posted to Reddit, captured an object, or objects, that were slower moving than a typical shooting star. They seemed to be not only burning, but breaking into pieces.
“I've seen videos of rockets breaking up, de-orbiting, and it reminded me of that,” he said.
What could this mystery be?
Some online commenters were reminded of “A Quiet Place,” a science fiction movie set after the arrival of murderous aliens on earth.
Others speculated that the video recorded a long defunct Russian space probe burning up on re-entry.
As it turns out, the fireball was of human origin, and it was made right here in the United States.
KUT reached out to UT Austin’s McDonald Observatory to try to identify the object. Within a day, Stephen Hummel, the observatory’s dark skies coordinator had an answer.
“We believe it to be a particular satellite called Capella 10,” he said.
Private eyes in the sky
Building and launching satellites has become vastly more affordable in recent years, leading governments and private companies to launch ever more orbiters.
There was a record 2,849 launched last year alone.
A growing number of those satellites belong to startup companies that advertise surveillance or intelligence services.
These private spy satellites can monitor everything from environmental conditions to shipping traffic to military troop movements for governmental and commercial customers.
Capella Space is one such firm.
According to the company’s website, Capella’s satellites are built to deliver, “actionable Earth observation data to solve your most pressing challenges.”
“Our in-house designed, built, and operated SAR satellite constellation provides 24/7/365 global insights to meet your mission-critical needs,” the website advertises.
In 2018, the company began launching a group of “synthetic aperture radar” or SAR satellites designed to more effectively see through cloud cover to the earth’s surface.
The SAR satellites were funded, in part, by a Department of Defense program aimed at gaining insight into North Korean missile locations.
The Cappella 10, the tenth such satellite put into orbit, launched on March 16, 2023.
But, according to an article by TechCrunch, the Capella satellites have been falling back to the ground sooner than expected.
The earlier-than-expected “de-orbiting” is “due to the combination of increased drag due to much higher solar activity than predicted by NOAA and less than expected performance from our 3rd party propulsion system,” Capella CEO Payam Banazadeh wrote to TechCrunch.
Space sleuthing
Hummel said he teamed up with Jonathan McDowell with the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to identify the object.
After determining the time and location where Ramazami took his video, they compared the information with a database that tracks where and when orbiting satellites are expected to come back to earth.
The Capella 10 fit the bill for what Ramazami saw on May 5.
Hummel said the slow movement of the object captured in Ramazami’s video also fit the design of the Capella satellite.
It is “larger than a typical communications satellite, and it has a large antenna about three and a half meters across, which I would think would create some extra drag,” Hummel said.
When reached for comment, Cappella Space agreed with Hummel’s conclusion.
“This event does align with our deorbit plan for Capella-10, so it is likely,” said Sarah Preston, a marketing and communications manager at the company. “Given the size of the satellite, it is also very likely there was little debris and most of it burned up upon reentry.”
An increasingly common sight
Hummel said images like the one captured by Ramazami will only become more common as more manmade space objects return to earth.
Last fall, residents of Dallas recorded the likely descent of some "space junk" back into the atmosphere, mistaking it for a meteor shower according to WFAA.
Earlier this month, debris from a failed SpaceX launch from South Texas was videotaped over the Caribbean and even disrupted air traffic in parts of Florida.
“I think probably one of my most common calls is: what is this thing in the sky?” Hummel said. “Nine times out of 10 it turns out to be a satellite or a rocket.”
And the tenth time?
“I've never seen UFOs,” he said. “I've seen some strange things in the sky, but they've always had explanations.”
When satellite operators have control of their satellites, they typically steer them to fall into the ocean to avoid dangerous debris falling on land.
But, Hummel said, the increase in man-made objects re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere raises concerns beyond falling space junk.
For one thing, burning satellites deposit “aluminum and copper and other metals in the upper atmosphere,” upon re-entry, he said. “That might be changing the composition of the upper atmosphere, including perhaps recreating holes in the ozone layer."
Since posting his video, Ramazami said he’s heard of people seeing the object as far away as Houston, making him wonder if any potential debris ended up in the Gulf of Mexico, the body of water between Mexico and the United States that the Trump administration renamed as the Gulf of America earlier this year.
“I'm just glad I saw it,” Ramazami said. “I'm a little disappointed that I looked at it through a phone when it was going on. But now I'm kind of happy that everyone's going to get to see it.”
